*Fine the Knicks the $40 million remaining on Brown's contract.(For being so stupid to hire him.)

No. 2 Auburn wins at S. Carolina: Was it dominant? No. But in conference play, on the road, it was dominant enough.

I fully expect all of you to throw that back in my face when I'm criticizing Ohio St. for winning ugly at Iowa on Saturday night.

TCU (finally) loses: Well, now THAT was a little unexpected. I know BYU was considered a "tough" game, but it WAS at TCU. And wasn't TCU supposed to be underrated?

The biggest impact? The most likely non-BCS team to go unbeaten (and crash the party) is now out of contention. (Was TCU looking ahead all the way to bowl season? Perhaps.)

The hope was that the new "5th" BCS bowl -- specifically created to placate non-BCS conferences -- would have at least one unbeaten non-BCS "Cinderella" (that was MY Big Idea for it, at least).

Now, TCU might be the best of the non-BCS-league teams, but by Monday, they'll be lucky to find a spot in the tenuous "20-25" range of the Top 25 poll.

Coming later today: Complete college football weekend preview!

NFL Notes: Is the NFL going to play more regular-season games outside the U.S.? I'm all for globalization of the NFL, but isn't it a little unfair to fans who only get 8 home games a year, as it is?

Trent Green out another two weeks? How many KC fans are with me that the best strategy is to tank the rest of this inevitably abysmal season to get a QB of the future, like Brady Quinn?

I love that Bill Belichick was able to lighten up and talk a little playful trash about Chad Johnson. Johnson is the anti-T.O. – an egomaniacal superstar WR who still manages to come across as a fun-loving guy.

You know what? I think I'm ready to nominate Chad Johnson as the "Face of Football."

Today's Must-Read: David Roth worked at Topps, and tells all about the experience. I met David at a party this spring. He's a great guy, and this is a great piece, written for Slate.

Did anyone else catch Deadspin Hall of Famer Carl Monday being profiled on the Daily Show last night? I was kind of hoping they'd interview Will Leitch for it, or at least name-check Deadspin. Ah well. I have to be satisfied with them humiliating Monday himself. -- D.S.

NFL Globalization: End preseason, extend the season to 18 games, and have everyone play 2 games abroad, before returning home for everyones "regular" 16 game schedule. By the way bigricks, the cocks are in the SEC.

Enough about teams tanking for Brady Quinn already!!! Why would you want a QB who wets his pants when he faces college quarterback pressure in the pocket? Mark my words, Drew Tate of Iowa will have a much better pro career simply by facing tougher competition week in, week out over the course of his collegiate career.

No matter how hard they try there is no way the Chiefs can tank as bad as the Buccaneers are going to tank. The Bucs schedule is viscious for the remainer of the season, with a 6th round rookie at QB... forget it. The Bucs have a serious chance to go 0-16 this year.

That said, do the Bucs give up on Simms and go with Quinn? Or do they go with the most awesome 2 man backfield in the league with Cadillac and Peterson? Or do they trade down to replenish their D with some youth?

I'm very disappointed in you Dan. You really think OSU will beat Iowa tomorrow night? OSU's defense has looked OK, but they really haven't faced a quarterback who is a third year starter, a great leader, and as composed as Drew Tate is. The guy is a stud. Add Albert Young, stud freshman wideout Dominic Douglas, and 6'7" tight end Scott Chandler, and Iowa looks like they can pick apart that defense with 9 new starters from a year ago. I'll be bragging to you tomorrow night!

Iowa's defense is starting to gel right now. I'm not worried. Plus, IT'S AT KINNICK. It is incredibly hard to win at Kinnick. This is the first night game there since 1992. The fans will be hyped. The fans will be loud. The fans will be drunk(let's face it, it's Iowa City). And they'll be into it. The Hawkeyes will feed off that energy.

I think that Chad Johnson is already well on his way to being the "face of football". He is on TV/radio/etc even more than TO (well, until this week...maybe THATS why the pills!)AND hes is deffinitely much more likable. Have you seen his Madden '07 commercials? Plus, I think that his new sportscenter commercial debuts today.

As a native New Englander who now resides in KC, there season was over when they hired Herm Edwards. I was never impressed with him as the Jets coach. Even with Trent Green they weren't going to do anything this year.

My question is this, if the Cards complete their collapse and the Astros make it in, now that Pedro's out, would the Astros then become the favorites in the NL with that pitching staff?

Whatever guys. Everything starts with the quarterback, so if that's Iowa's advantage, then that's a pretty good advantage. I really don't think Texas is all that good. Kinnick is probably the most underrated stadium in all of college football. You'll be eating your words Sunday morning. Unfortunately, I will be unable to brag right after the game as I will be out of town and without computer or internet access, but I will brag as soon as I can!!

I think we've all seen in recent years that the hottest team going into the post-season has a HUGE advantage.

The Astros are obviously the hottest team, if they make the playoffs their confidence will be so high, they won't even consider the prospect of losing.

Look at the last few years, the White Sox looked like they were falling apart, then got hot the last couple of weeks, carried that momentum into the playoffs and only lost once. In 2004 the Sox had a phenomonal run in August and September and rode that to the World Series win. In 2003 the Marlins did the same, playing well down the stretch and grabbing the wild card, and playing well, winning the world series. In 02 the Angels did the same.

No one wants to play the Stros if they do get in, they'd be easily the hottest team in baseball, not to mention that NASTY pitching staff, with Rhode Island native Dan Wheeler closing out games, ok, well maybe that doesn't help them, but still.

Plus, you don't think Clemens would love winning a World Series against the Yankees. As a way to prove he can do it without the best team surrounding him, like he did while in NY.

Lenny, Lenny, Lenny...I admire your optimism, however for you to say O State's defense has looked OK is insane. The defense has given up an average of lets see 12+7+7+6= 32/4= 8 points per game. last I saw Iowa had a difficult time beating a woeful Syracuse team.

Is Jason Marquis the biggest waste of pure talent ever? He's got stuff to die for and is in a contract year, but he refuses to use his pitches in the way they're most effective every time he pitches. Is it wrong of me to wish harm to him?

Tate didnt play against Syracuse. Manson did and he sucked it up. The defense did just fine. Hello, they stopped Syracuse SEVEN TIMES inside the 2 yard line. I'd say they're fine on defense. And OSU's defense hasn't played an experienced quarterback. How many times do I have to say it? Everything on offense starts with the quarterback. An experienced one is a little better than a freshman(Texas-McCoy) and a first year starter(Penn State-Morelli). Add a 1300 yard rusher to that, things are looking good.

Dan, you really gotta hold out hope for the Reds. Let's say they win out (82-80), Cards lose out (81-80), and the Astros win one more (82-80)....then you've got The Cards playing the Giants Monday to force a THREE-WAY tie.....that means play-in games Tuesday AND Wednesday just to see who gets the Mets....on Thursday!

Lenny makes a convincing argument. We'll say Iowa has one great goal-line stand against OSU. So we'll change the predicted final score to 34-11.

Wait a second. 7 times? Consecutively? Does that mean Iowa gave up an automatic first down penalty on the goal line? Whoops, that'll cost you; good defenses don't make bone-headed penalties. Back to 38-11.

One thing on Ohio State, which is true for a few other college programs, is that you never ever have to worry about the defense. Especially in the Tressel era, but even through the Cooper years. The offense? sure. One can worry about that each season. But Ohio State just unwraps a new top 10 defense every year.

Ok Lenny you say everything starts with the QB, well as we all know Troy Smith is one of the leading candidates for the Heisman, Tate is good, but I do not hear his name mention in Heisman talk, and if Iowa struggled against a sub-sub par Syracuse team, and an Illinois team having an off year, how do you think they are going to fair against an Ohio State squad that boast three(Smith, Ginn, Pittman) legitamate Heisman candidates...OH, did I forget to mention Anthony Gonzales.

As a Mets fan, I'm not yet concerned. Yes, Pedro not being there isn't great, but remember, he's been not there for a while now. And based on his post-injury starts, No Pedro > Injured Calf Pedro.

As for starting pitching in general, the Mets rely on bashing the crap out of the other team to win. That means they match up well against the Phillies, Cards, or Padres ... but not so much against the Dodgers or Astros. So an ideal situation for the Mets would be for the teams to be Mets-Cards-Dodgers(Div)-Padres(WC). Then if the Cards can beat the Dodgers, a Mets-Cards NLCS. So while I'd love a Cards collapse (still hate them from the ol' NL East days), right now they're a better option from my Mets.

...just realized: I didn't include the Reds in my analysis, and that's because I'm not sure about their pitching (they haven't been on most people's radar for awhile now). What's the word, Reds followers? How do you see a Reds-Mets matchup?

The math thing CHRTH put together is great. Using that logic, Montana St is 8 points better than top ten Georgia

Montana St 19 Colorado 10 (+9)Georgia 14 Colorado 13 (+1)

As for the KC tanking thing, please not for Brady Quinn. So overrated. If there were a Peyton (or even Eli) Manning ready to be drafted, I'd agree. Brady Quinn is not going to be anywhere near that league. While he's a good college quarterback, he plays for the most overhyped, overrated college football team in the nation.

@benvious: I *was* being tongue in cheek on that. Obviously raw scores don't take into account weather, home field, injuries, etc. I just thought it was interesting that there was actually a way to calculate using multiple intervening teams (a simple a>b>c relationship, like Montana St/Georgia, is usually less correct than an a>b>c>d relationship because the impact of an aberrant result is greater with a smaller sample size)

nah, I'll be here Sunday afternoon when I get back and shove Iowa's victory in everybody's faces! Don't automatically give OSU a win. It's a conference game, against a ranked team, and it's away. That's a lot of things going against them! Enough has happened this year (Colorado-Mont. St., Georgia-Colorado, BYU-TCU) to show us that anything can happen on any give Saturday.....except that BYU-TCU game which was actually on a Thursday. But the argument stays the same!!!

ChrTh said... Wow, did anyone have Kansas City in the Weekly "Which Team Will Shanoff Suggest Tank for Brady Quinn" pool? I had Detroit this week.

Although technically this is the second pick in one week, with the Bucs being called earlier. How do we count that?

My pick for next week, btw, is the Miami Dolphins.

I was thinking the Browns, with Dan using the "they will get their O line back together next year and Quinn will pull it all together" reasoning

couple of quick hits....

Pedro Done = Mets still decent (They ran away with the NL east with him on the DL.. remember that?)

KC? man they need some wideouts, because they are going to see a shit load of 8 man fronts this year... Trent Green or no Trent Green

the NFL has an opportunity to bring global media to a whole new level, but for the record, David Stern had this idea first.. his sport just doesn't have the popularity for it to blow up like it will for the NFL

Tiger update:He's -4 through (um, 11, 12, or 13 holes, I'm suddently drawing a blank) to be -12 for the tournament. 2 strokes ahead of Paddy, but Jim Furyk has been en fuego today-- -6 so far -- and also sits 2 back. It'd be funny if Furyk and Woods were partnered this weekend.

In head to head matchups, the Reds and Mets were pretty even (4-3,adv. Mets). However, imo Reds pitching has been rather inconsistent this year. Overall, I think that the Mets would have the advantage in playoffs, but I momentum can be a funny thing...

Dammit benvious, you just stole my thunder - I was working on a solid and unrefutable proof that Michigan State is 98 points better than Georgia.

My real point was for chrth, though - first, I could tell to begin with that you were joking about the points (a clue for everybody who misses jokes when written in sans serif - the score of 11 made it obvious that those numbers were for entertainment purposes only); second, although I appreciated your humor the first time around, your defense of your abcd method was what I can only call ludicrous. It's the fact that there are outliers in the data that makes the data weird; adding extra cases does very little to fix that (especially if the extra cases are outliers too).

I know this wasn't mentioned in the column, but this is just too good. There was an update on Raiders backup QB Tuiasasopo this morning. Apparently the Bucs are trying to trade for him.

This was Art Shell's response: "Tui is a very capable quarterback for us," coach Art Shell said. "You don't just give a guy away because somebody else wants him. You can't hurt your football team. To have got rid of Tui, look where we'd be right now."

Look where we'd be right now...what, as opposed to being one of the bottom 3-5 teams in football?

I'm a huge Raiders fan, but Al Davis, Art Shell, Fred Biletnikoff, Willie Brown, while all great for the Raiders organization in their primes, are done. They need to put together an old folks team and leave the Raiders alone. I don't think these guys could coach a peewee team to a win.

Yeah, I should've qualified my a>b>c>d comments a tad. It really doesn't work in college football because talent disparity causes 45-3 games. What I really should've said was, the ISU-Iowa-UT-OSU 'appears' to have greater validity because none of the score differentials were greater than 20. Of course, that would be an arbitrary number, thus rendering an analysis invalid. I'll shut up now.

Besides, anyone knows you can't work stuff out like that in College Football. Wasn't it last season that MSU-UM-ND the home team lost every matchup? A>B>C>A?!?

I LOVE this Ohio State-Iowa debate! I am no longer paying attention to baseball...it's football season, the Indians took a dump (although they did help out some of their AL Central foes by beating others) and I'll start watching when the playoffs begin, if nothing else is on.

Pleeeease don't say "Brady Quinn to the Browns". I do think he is overrated in some aspects, and he seems like a nice kid...I don't want to see him physically harmed because there is no OL to protect him (he'd be thrown out there right away since he's overrated and people will think he's the answer). Send him elsewhere.

Hmm, I had more comments but work keeps interrupting me...do continue this OSU-Iowa debate.

You are too quick for teams to 'tank' seasons for 1st round draft picks. On the other side of the spectrum, you absolutely love it when a team comes back from nowhere to conted for the playoffs, rattling off a great win streak as such. It is WAY to early in the NFL season to be tanking anything. Even the Raiders could rattle off a few wins in the next 3-4 weeks and be sitting in the middle of the pack. No more tanking games until week 6 ATLEAST, I will not be asking the Bucs to tank a single game until week 8, and they have to have a 0-8 record for me to even do that.

Enough about teams tanking for Brady Quinn already!!! Why would you want a QB who wets his pants when he faces college quarterback pressure in the pocket? Mark my words, Drew Tate of Iowa will have a much better pro career simply by facing tougher competition week in, week out over the course of his collegiate career.

I guess I pretty much have to question the thought that "week in week out" Drew Tate faces better competition than Brady Quinn. This season he plays Ohio State at home, Michigan on the road, and if you want to reach Wisconsin at home. That's it, otherwise it's 9 walk-over games (which if you saw their performance at Syracuse, probably doesn't exist for Iowa).

Quinn has already played against more competition in four weeks than Iowa will see all year. You've got at Georgia Tech, Penn State, Michigan, at Michigan State, UCLA (a bit of a reach), and at USC. I would say that's pretty consisten competition. Plus he plays under an infinitely larger spotlight at ND. How is Quinn not facing pressure this year?

Don't worry too much about the Mets yet. Remember two things, Pedro has missed half of the season. And two, they were actually 11-12 in his starts (including his ungodly ERA of something around 17 his last 4 starts). They have been the best team in the NL all season without him...still the same team as always.

Dan... Did you even watch the TCU-BYU game? How can you even say that TCU is still the best of the non-BCS teams. BYU dominated the game from start to finish. Factor in that BYU lost on a last-second FG to Arizona, and in 2OT to BC...

How can you say that Team A is still better than Team B when they just lost to Team B at home by 14 points (21, if you don't count the garbage TD in the 4th..) ?!?!

Oh and Dan, if you read this...I am BLAMING this Mets/Pedro thing on you. I remember when we were doing our picks, and I said A's & Mets, and then immediately asked you to change yours to prevent the jinx. There is still time...PLEASE!

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DanShanoff.com is a sports-blog spin-off of my long-time ESPN.com column, "The Daily Quickie." Anchored by an early-morning post of must-know topics, the blog is updated frequently throughout the day with new posts and user comments.